Perfume as a craft and as a language

Ask somebody to describe a smell and watch what happens. They will reach for another sense. It is warm, or sharp, or bright, or heavy, or green. They will reach for a memory. They will reach, if they have read anything about perfume, for a vocabulary of notes and accords and a pyramid with a top, a heart and a base. That last set of terms feels ancient and technical. It is neither.

What perfume is made of

Start with the physical craft, because the vocabulary makes more sense once the materials are clear. Traditional perfumery draws on a small number of categories of material.

• Essential oils, obtained by steam distillation of plant material. Lavender, rose, neroli from orange blossom, citrus peels expressed rather than distilled.
• Absolutes and concretes, obtained by solvent extraction, which captures molecules too fragile or heavy to survive distillation. Jasmine and tuberose are the classic cases.
• Resins and balsams: frankincense, myrrh, benzoin, labdanum, storax. These are plant exudates, collected by wounding the bark, and they are among the oldest traded goods in the world.
• Animal materials: musk, civet, castoreum, ambergris. All are now largely or entirely replaced by synthetics in commercial perfumery, for reasons of supply, cost, consistency and animal welfare.
• Aroma chemicals, isolated from natural sources or synthesised. This category now does most of the work in most perfumes on sale.

Every one of these except the last was available in some form in antiquity, and the archaeological record of the incense and resin trade is extensive. Frankincense and myrrh moved along established routes across Arabia; the {BM_LABEL} and other collections hold containers and equipment associated with the trade. What antiquity did not have was the ability to isolate a single molecule and use it on its own.

The moment the craft changed

The decisive break came from the coal tar chemistry of the nineteenth century. Coumarin, which smells of new mown hay and tonka bean, was synthesised in 1868 by William Henry Perkin. Vanillin, the principal odorant of vanilla, was synthesised in the 1870s by Wilhelm Haarmann and Ferdinand Tiemann. These were not substitutes for existing perfumes. They were materials that could be used at concentrations and in combinations that natural extracts made impossible.

The consequences show up quickly. Houbigant's Fougère Royale, released in 1882 and composed by Paul Parquet, used coumarin to build a scent that does not correspond to any actual plant: fougère means fern, and ferns are essentially odourless. It is a perfume named after a smell that does not exist, which is a genuinely modern idea and which founded an entire family that is still one of the main categories in masculine perfumery. Aimé Guerlain's Jicky, in 1889, used vanillin and coumarin alongside natural materials. Chanel No. 5, composed by Ernest Beaux and launched in 1921, is famous for its use of aliphatic aldehydes, which give it a quality often described as abstract and which sits at some distance from any flower.

That word abstract is the point. Once you can compose with molecules rather than with extracts, perfume stops being an attempt to capture a smell that exists in the world and becomes a compositional art with its own possibilities. This is exactly the transition that painting made at roughly the same time, and the parallel is not a coincidence: both depended on new industrially produced materials arriving in tubes and bottles.

Fougère means fern. Ferns have no smell. An entire perfume family is named for an absence, and has been selling for a hundred and forty years.

Where the words came from

Now the vocabulary. The musical metaphor, notes and accords and harmony, was established in perfumery writing during the nineteenth century, at a period when analogies between the senses were fashionable in both science and art. It is a useful metaphor because it captures something real: individual materials combine into effects that are not present in any of them separately, which is what an accord is.

The three tier pyramid is later and more specific. It divides a composition into top notes, which are volatile and appear first, heart or middle notes, which form the body, and base notes, which are heavy, persistent and appear last. Its widespread adoption is generally credited to Jean Carles, a perfumer who lost his sense of smell in later life and who set up an influential training method at a French perfumery house in the mid twentieth century. He devised systematic exercises for teaching students to identify and combine materials, and the pyramid is a pedagogical device from that tradition.

It then escaped into marketing, where it has been doing service ever since, and where it does something the teaching version never claimed: it implies that every perfume has a legible structure of exactly three parts. Many do not. Linear compositions, which smell much the same for their whole life on skin, are common and sometimes deliberate. A pyramid printed on a press release is a description of an intention rather than a measurement.

Families, wheels and other tidying up

Classification schemes are the other layer. Perfume families, floral, chypre, fougère, oriental and so on, are partly technical and partly historical: chypre is named for a Guerlain era composition referencing Cyprus and describes a structure involving citrus, labdanum and oakmoss. Circular diagrams arranging the families by relationship were developed in the later twentieth century as retail and training tools. They are helpful. They are also a retail fixture, designed to move a customer from something they know to something they might buy, which is a legitimate purpose and worth naming.

The word oriental, long used for the warm resinous family, has been substantially replaced in professional use in recent years by terms such as amber, on the grounds that it named a fantasy of elsewhere rather than a structure. That change is recent enough to be visible in progress, and it is a rare opportunity to watch the vocabulary of a craft being revised in real time.

How to read a perfume description

Three practical corrections follow from the history. First, a note list is a marketing document, not a formula, and the materials named may not be present as such. Second, the pyramid describes an intended reading rather than a measured decay curve. Third, the language of naturalness that surrounds contemporary perfume marketing sits oddly against a craft that has been substantially synthetic since the 1880s, and the finest compositions of the last century are all synthetic in part.

None of which makes any of it less good. It makes it a made thing, with a history and an authorship and a vocabulary that somebody invented for a reason. That is more interesting than a fern. For the broader question of how the words used to sell beauty acquired their peculiar grammar, see the language of beauty copywriting, and for the older ritual and bathing context in which scent was first used, see bathing cultures.

Where to look

Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The British Museum, collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.